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App-etite for Destruction? Android and iOS Are Killing The Web

Chris Dixon, the entrepreneur turned venture capitalist, is worried about the web. In a post titled “The decline of the mobile web,” Dixon lays it out pretty succinctly. Citing data from Flurry and comScorecomScore, Dixon reminds us that mobile is taking over from the desktop. On top of that, the amount of time on mobile is increasingly spent inside of apps, not the web browser. And Dixon is concerned about what this portends:

This is a worrisome trend for the web. Mobile is the future. What wins mobile, wins the Internet. Right now, apps are winning and the web is losing … This will hurt long-term innovation … Apps have a rich-get-richer dynamic that favors the status quo … The end state will probably be like cable TV – a few dominant channels/apps that sit on users’ home screens and everything else relegated to lower tiers or irrelevance.

[Apple and Google] reject entire classes of apps without … allowing for recourse (e.g. AppleApple has rejected all apps related to Bitcoin). The open architecture of the web led to an incredible era of experimentation. Many startups were controversial when they were first founded. What if AOLAOL … had controlled the web, and developers had to ask permission to create Google, Youtube, eBay, Paypal, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Sadly, this is where we’re headed on mobile.

If he’s right, this could be bad for everyone, not just Dixon and his partners. And what a turnaround. Just days earlier, Marc Andreessen, whose name is on the door at Dixon’s firm, Andreessen-Horowitz was just celebrating the 20th anniversary of Netscape, the company he founded to commercialize the web browser. For his part, Andreessen was asked about this “apps eating the web” question and was more sanguine in an interview with Wired back in April 2012.

The application model of the future is the web application model … Mobile apps on platforms like iOS and Android are a temporary step along the way toward the full mobile web. Now, that temporary step may last for a very long time … But if you grant me the very big assumption that at some point we will have ubiquitous, high-speed wireless connectivity, then in time everything will end up back in the web model. Because the technology wants it to work that way.

The technology might want it, but it’s not especially clear users do; at least not right now. Over the past two years, mobile connectivity has gotten much better in the U.S. as widespread availability of 4G LTE has become a reality. (Remember that on iPhone, the first model to offer it was the iPhone 5 in September 2012.) And still, apps have grown at the expense of the browser. As to why, it’s a combination of factors. Because they can access hardware like cameras directly and because native code allows apps to run faster, they provide a better user experience for whatever the underlying service is.

Once you build a good app, users will overwhelmingly prefer it to whatever mobile website you might offer, which will then cause you to spend your development resources on that app. That sets off two cycles one virtuous, one vicious where the app gets better over time and the mobile site gets even worse. There has been a long back-and-forth among experts in tech circles about when or whether that pendulum will swing the other direction. Facebook notoriously bet on the web and HTML 5, believing it could offer a great mobile experience that way. When it tried and wasn’t successful, it rebuilt its apps in native code and has since become wildly successful on smartphones.

Still, many believe — like Andreessen — that the app won’t win forever, at least not in its current form. Paul Stamatiou, a designer at Twitter and a startup veteran, tweeted last November: “How many yrs until native mobile apps as we know them don’t exist? 10? No more installing. Mobile browsers/OS will be different beasts then.” Importantly, Stamatiou wasn’t necessarily betting on a comeback of the browser as we know it but rather a change in the current model of hunting for the app you need in the app store and having to install it and set it up yourself.

He envisioned a future that works like this. Your smartphone or tablet reports to you: “Users like you enjoy this app/site so we set it up for you automatically and opened it up when we thought you had free time.” When asked to explain what that looked like, Stamatiou added, “Less ‘app’ more seamless part of your OS experience. It won’t feel like you’re browsing some website. Everything will just fade.” If that sounds a bit ethereal it might make sense to think of Apple’s Passbook as one example. If you load an airline boarding pass or Starbucks card into Passbook, it’s there and easily accessed, almost automatically at the right instant. Think of Yelp reviews that surface by asking Siri for nearby Italian restaurants. All of these things could — and perhaps will — just happen for you in a future version of iOS or Android.

Two weeks after that Twitter conversation, the often pointed venture capitalist Keith Rabois, who backed Yelp among many others, said, “nobody is going to be using the web soon” in a tweet. As people began to argue with Rabois, he added “haven’t been wrong yet and predicted 6-7 fairly major and controversial things before anyone else.” Hamish Mckenzie, who was writing for the website Pando at the time and has since gone off to work at Tesla, took Rabois to task: “Hahaha. Let’s come back to this conversation in 5 years. I will hold you to ‘nobody is going to use the web soon.’ ” Rabois doubled down in reply: “ won’t take 5 years. Nobody will be using laptops either, except as purely professional tools.”

Whether Rabois proves right or not, the consensus among all of these guys is that the mobile internet will continue to diverge from the browser-based one that dominated over the past two decades. Even Andreessen’s vision of the future presumes that the technology gets much more robust on the web than it is today. Certainly, anyone who lives with web-based e-mail or Google’s own productivity apps can tell you how unsatisfying performance can be inside a browser tab — even when you’re on a good internet connection on a powerful computer. And the PC has entered a long, slow decline as the center of the computing universe, suggesting that apps have a good long window to get even more entrenched in our lives.

If the web itself is going to stage a comeback, it’s certainly not going to happen anytime soon. Once we’ve accepted that loss, the next challenge will be figuring out how to make the app era better. Perhaps Dixon will have less to be concerned with if Google and Apple end up on the right side of that challenge.

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